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summonses or bringing someone in for trial); for registering loans and slaves.
The Sudebniki also prescribed the percentage of suits to be turned over to the
court as well as a host of other fees, all of which were to assure that those
carrying out Middle Muscovite law would not go hungry.
65
As mentioned earlier, Russianlaw especially worried about ‘the law’sdelay’.
Expeditiousresolutionof conflicts andpaymentof the requiredfees wasalmost
always uppermost in the oral society of 1497,
66
which was becoming increas-
ingly literate after 1550.
67
Delaying the process, which by 1550 had become
triadic, was something the state (at least in theory) would not tolerate.
68
The most elemental point of the Sudebniki was that judges in no way could
make law, by interpretation, by analogy, by ‘flexibility’ or any other means.
The judge had to resolve the case in front of him on the basis of what was
presented at trial. Any other case had to be sent to Moscow for resolution.
69
The degree of centralisation called for in 1550 is extraordinary: many cases had
to be sent to Moscow for final resolution.
70
The ‘Agapetus state’ (in which the
sovereign believed he was God’s vicegerent on earth and most of his subjects
concurred in that belief ) could not tolerate norms being established anywhere
other than in Moscow. In the eighteenth century, this led to a clogging of the
Russian courts, which was only undone by Alexander II’s famous Judicial
Reform of 1864.
Thereweredifferentlevels of courts in earlymodern Russia – local, peasant,
provincial, capital, the ruler’s court – but there was no system of appeal.
71
The
verdict a litigant got was the verdict the litigant was stuck with. The law’s
assumption (and also its demand) was that the judge was a disinterested person
who weighed the testimony and, following the rules, rendered a verdict which
any reasonable person in the same circumstances would issue. A litigant could
suea judge formalfeasance,butthat wasanother matter – whichdidnotreopen
the case. Official malfeasance was a major concern in 1550, and much of the
65 1497 Sudebnik,arts.3–8, 15–18, 21–6, 28–30, 36, 38–40, 44, 48, 50, 53, 64, 65, 68; 1550Sudebnik,
arts. 8–12, 15, 16, 18, 28, 30–1, 33–42, 44–6, 49–51, 55, 59, 62, 65, 74, 75, 77; 1589 Sudebnik,
arts. 10–17, 21, 27, 29, 77–9, 81–91, 94–6, 99, 102, 116, 133, 134, 139. On summonses, see 1497
Sudebnik,art.26; 1550 Sudebnik,arts.21, 41; 1589 Sudebnik,arts.168, 171.
66 1497 Sudebnik,arts.27, 32.
67 1550 Sudebnik,arts.62, 69 mention that some officials are literate, others are not. See
also 1589 Sudebnik,arts.116, 123.
68 1550Sudebnik,arts.41, 42, 49, 69, 72, 75; 1589 Sudebnik,arts.98, 99, 124, 129, 134.
69 1550Sudebnik,arts.7, 98; 1589 Sudebnik,arts.8, 201.
70 Inter alia, see 1550 Sudebnik,arts.39, 54, 63, 66, 67, 69, 71, 72, 76, 77, 100; 1589 Sudebnik,
arts. 117, 119, 120, 121, 126, 128, 129, 136–40, 204.
71 1497 Sudebnik,arts.19, 21; 1550Sudebnik,arts.28, 37, 38, 60, 97; 1589 Sudebnik,arts.75, 86,
200.
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code’s severe punishments (high fines, public flogging, jailing) were reserved
for officials who abused their positions.
72
A litigant also could appeal to the
sovereign (grand prince until 1547, tsar after that), and the ruler, employing
what we might call his ‘Agapetus powers’, could reverse the case. That was not
spelled out in the law at all, and if such a reversal occurred, it was an expression
of his arbitrariness, not because anyone believed he had divine knowledge of
the case. Whether this happened, and, if so, how often, is unknown. The law
itself in 1550 became frequently an expression of arbitrariness. Instead of laying
down a sanction for an offence, it just said that the culprit would be punished
as the tsar decreed, a legal expression of the Agapetus state.
73
The evolution of the rules of evidence is one of the most interesting devel-
opments in the Sudebniki. As just mentioned, the society was making a radical
transition in this period from one based primarily on oral tradition
74
to one in
which written documents could (it is too early to say ‘should’) play a major
role (already seen in the Pskov Judicial Charter). The major force propelling
this forward was the introduction of the chancelleries (prikazy)in1550, which
themselves kept records and demanded that their agents in the provinces keep
them informed with a constant flow of information. By the 1570s–1580s all
officials of the Provincial Felony Administration were required to be literate.
Those men were elected by their peers from among the ranks of the middle
service class, the provincial cavalrymen.
Another form of evidencewas divine revelation,such as the casting of lots,
75
the oath,
76
and the judicial duel (pole), the subject of a surprising number of
articles.
77
Trial by combat seems to have been almost the premier form of
evidence/proof in 1497 and 1550. At some time at the end of the sixteenth
century it went out of use. No one knows why, but a good suggestion has been
that the introduction of firearms (especially pistols) cast aspersion on notions
that whoever was the better shot was the person designated by God as the
righteous one. Another factor putting the duel out of business may have been
72 1550Sudebnik,arts.3–5, 18, 21, 32, 38, 53, 54, 71; 1589Sudebnik,arts.3–5, 29, 80, 104–6, 126.In
some sense, the worst official sanction was disgrace (opala), whereby an official became
a nobody (1550Sudebnik,art.7; 1589 Sudebnik,art.8).
73 1550Sudebnik,arts.3, 25, 26, 44, 53, 67, 69, 75; 1589 Sudebnik,arts.39, 43, 105, 123.
74 1497 Sudebnik,art.34; 1550 Sudebnik,arts.53, 69, 95, 99.Art.99 demanded that oral
witnesses could report only what they had actually seen (also 1589 Sudebnik,art.203).
75 1550Sudebnik,art.27.
76 1497 Sudebnik,arts.46–8, 52, 58; 1550 Sudebnik,arts.16, 19, 25, 27, 93; 1589 Sudebnik,arts.
27, 30, 40, 74.
77 1497 Sudebnik,arts.4–7, 38, 48–9, 52, 68; 1550Sudebnik,arts.9–17, 19, 62, 89; 1589Sudebnik,
arts. 12–22, 27, 28, 30, 180.
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the introduction of the concept of dishonour in the 1550 Sudebnik,
78
which
expanded to the point in 1649 that everyone from the lowest slave or peasant
to the highest boyar in Muscovy had a dishonour value either stated in the law
or based on his governmental compensation entitlement level. Thus instead
of having to fight a physical duel, a person who felt he had been dishonoured
could go to court and the court would determine whether or not this was
so. The oath suffered a decline in prestige as presumably the populace began
to have increasing doubts that the Russian Orthodox Church was the sole
source of truth. Material evidence (the stolen goods, for example) was used,
as were varying forms of human evidence. One was witnesses (presumably
primarilyeyewitnesses;character,rumour orhearsaywitnesses werenolonger
distinguished),
79
another was the judicial confrontation (the plaintiff had to
confront the defendant face to face and repeat his charges). The last form
of evidence was the investigation (a special subset of which was the ‘general
investigation’ (poval’nyi obysk) in which an entire community was interrogated
about ‘Who owned the cow with the crooked horn?’; the litigant who got the
most ‘votes’ won the case).
80
Primitive societies had troubles deciding what to do with people between
the time an accusation was initiated and a court verdict was rendered. Such
societies did not have jails to detain the accused, which many would say is
punishing the accused before he is found guilty in any case. An alternative to
jail was to let a contract to someone to keep chained to the wall a detainee,
who then had to pay a ‘chaining fee’ (pozheleznoe) for the detention as well
as somehow pay for his keep (or perhaps have relatives bring him food).
81
The Sudebnik of 1497 provided an alternative: an accused could post bail or
satisdation (poruka) in lieu of being chained to a wall.
82
By 1613 ‘crimes’ and especially punishments differed markedly from what
had been the practices in the 1170s. Most of this can be viewed as part of the
evolution from the dyadic to the triadic legal process. In the Pravda, ‘crimes’
were torts in which the wronged was supposed to receive composition and
compensation. The more modern notion of ‘society’ as the real victim was
78 A forerunner can be seen in 1497 Sudebnik,art.53. See especially 1550 Sudebnik,art.26,
whichlists a dishonour sum for most residents of Muscovy, including peasants and slaves.
See also arts. 25, 31, 62,and70. 1589 Sudebnik,arts.39, 41–73. These last articles amount
essentiallytoa bezchest’e(dishonour) statute, anticipating chapter10 of the 1649 Ulozhenie.
79 1497 Sudebnik,arts.46, 47, 52; 1550Sudebnik,arts.15–18; 1589 Sudebnik,arts.20–2, 27–9.
80 On the investigation (obysk), see 1497 Sudebnik,arts.14, 34; 1550 Sudebnik,arts.52, 56, 57,
72; 1589 Sudebnik,art.205 et al.
81 1550Sudebnik,arts.3, 70; 1589 Sudebnik,arts.3, 125.
82 1497 Sudebnik,arts.14, 31, 35; 1550Sudebnik,arts.12, 47, 49, 54, 55, 58, 70, 72; 1589 Sudebnik,
arts. 10, 17, 81, 96, 98, 99, 106, 107, 125, 128, 129.
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totally absent. The notion that society was the victim of crime became preva-
lent in the Sudebniki. Then the question arises: how is the criminal to pay his
debt to society? Sitting in prison is one answer, but Muscovy did not have
prisons until 1550,
83
and they were not used very much for penal incarceration
until decades later. Exile and banishment are other useful social sanctions, but
are very expensive in labour-short societies such as was Muscovy. The same
holds for capital punishment:
84
who can benefit from a dead man (unless he
is so heinous that society can tolerate him under no circumstance)? Corpo-
ral punishment proved to be the answer.
85
There were any number of forces
pushing Muscovy in the direction of corporal punishment savagery (which
peaked in the ‘Felony Statute’ of 1663, combining chapters 21 and 22 of the
Ulozhenie of 1649), including more ‘Western’ law such as the West Russian
Lithuanian Statutes of 1529, 1566 and 1588, but the major impetus was certainly
the domestic requirement of ‘getting tough’ on crime. The Byzantine legal
heritage may have played a role in the increasing savagery of Muscovite law,
but it is fairly evident that the Mongol hegemony (1237–1480) did not.
Prior to 1497, capital punishment was reserved for few offences. But the 1550
Sudebnik lengthened thelisttoinclude somehomicides,arson,horsetheft,theft
from a church, theft of a slave, treason, brigandage, rebellion, recidivism for
lesser felonies.
86
The issue of intent did not enter into Muscovite sanctions
until the Ulozhenie of 1649. A thief with a criminal reputation and apprehended
with stolen goods was put to death if accused by five or six men. Plaintiffs’
claims were exacted from his property. The ‘burden of proof’ for execution
in 1550 was expanded to a general inquest of the population. If the inquest
recorded that he was a good person, he was to be tried by normal procedures.
Regardless, he was to be tortured.
87
If he confessed, he was to be executed.
If he failed to confess, he was to be jailed for life. In 1589 torture was made
more precise: 100 blows with the knout (which certainly would have killed
an ordinary person). In 1589, if the inquest reported the accused to be a good
person, he was to be acquitted immediately.
88
83 1550Sudebnik,arts.7–11, 13, 33, 34, 46, 53, 55, 58; 1589 Sudebnik,arts.8, 11, 16, 18, 105, 107.
84 1550 Sudebnik,arts.56, 57, 59–61; 1589 Sudebnik,arts.108, 109, 113–15. See also the earlier
discussion of various delicts.
85 1550Sudebnik,arts.5, 6, 8, 9, 28, 32–4, 42, 47, 53, 54, 58, 99; 1589 Sudebnik,arts.5, 6, 11, 12,
80, 81, 104–6, 110.
86 1497 Sudebnik,arts.8, 39. See also n. 62 above. Most interesting is the stress that deserving
felons had to be executed and could not be turned over to their victims as slaves to
compensate the victims for their losses, even if the felons’ property was insufficient to
compensate the victims.
87 See 1497 Sudebnik,art.34 [torture]; 1550 Sudebnik,arts.52, 56, 57, 72. 74.
88 1589 Sudebnik,art.103.
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Other punishments ranged from flogging with the knout (for a first theft,
plus a fine), incarceration, to the old-fashioned fine.
89
A most visible element
in the criminal sphere was the increasing introduction of the government.
Ordinary subjects could still file complaints, but anything ‘interesting’ was
soon taken over and prosecuted by the state.
The ‘Agapetus state’ came to believe that it had enhanced responsibilities
not only in the political and criminal spheres, but increasingly in all other
spheres of life as well. The three factors in any economy are land, labour and
capital. By 1613 the government laid claims to nearly complete control over the
first two, and probably would have over capital as well had there been much
to control. (See Chapter 23.) Control over land prior to 1480 was primarily a
political exercise, not an economic one. Land was so sparsely populated that
control over any particular parcel (except in the few urban areas) was hardly
something to be contested. Control over large areas was important because
the state and its agents could travel around and find people to tax, occasionally
to levy military recruits from, and to be present to offer conflict resolution
services to on demand. Monasteries were really the sole exception. They could
collect rents only from peasants living on their parcels of lands and estates. This
was why it was the monasteries which introduced St George’s Day to control
the mobility of their peasant debtors during the chaotic labour situation after
the civil war of 1425–53.
But by the 1497 Sudebnik much had changed. On the issue of land, the gov-
ernmentof Ivan III discovered after the annexation of Novgorod and the depor-
tation of its landowners that land could be mobilised to enhance its military
might. Thus the first ‘service-class revolution’ was initiated by replacing the
Novgorodian landowners with Muscovite cavalrymen, who wereassigned ser-
vice landholdings on which lived about thirty peasant households to pay them
rent to enable them to render military service. Each landholding (pomest’e)
was tenureable only while service was being rendered; after service ceased,
the pomeshchik had to surrender his assigned lands to another serviceman. The
system was mentioned in the 1497 Sudebnik.
90
As Moscow grew in size, many
of the annexed lands were put into the pomest’e system. In 1556, as part of the
campaign to raise troops to annexe the lower Volga (south of Kazan’, annexed
in 1552), the government got the idea that it could demand service from all land
89 1497 Sudebnik,arts.10, 62; 1550 Sudebnik,arts.5, 6, 28, 55, 58, 87, 99; 1589 Sudebnik,arts.
4–6, 11, 12, 13, 16, 80, 81, 102, 103, 105–7, 112, 113, 170, 172, 203, 212, 213. The considerable
expansion of savage flogging between 1550 and 1589 is evident just in this list.
90 1497 Sudebnik,arts.29, 63; 1550Sudebnik,art.84. There were no service landholdings in
the Dvina Land, so it is not surprising that the 1589 Sudebnik did not mention the subject.
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(previouslyservice fromtheother major form of landholding, landownership–
the votchina – had been in some respects optional). The 1556 edict prescribed
that one outfitted cavalryman had to be provided from each 100 cheti (1 chet’ =
1.39 US acres or half a hectare) of populated land.
91
This forced estate owners
into the market to hire military slaves to meet their recruiting quotas and
the military muster records are full of lists of these slave cavalrymen. By the
1580s perhaps 80 per cent of the military land fund was pomest’e land and it
appeared as though the votchina might die out. This did not happen because
every pomeshchik’s aspiration was to become a votchinnik who could pass his
estate to his heirs, which became often practice in the second half of the seven-
teenth century and de jure reality in the eighteenth century. Prior to 1450 East
Slavic princes regarded all land in their domains as their personal patrimonial
property which they were free to dispose of as they pleased. After 1556, most
usable land de facto was land which could be mobilised by the state for military
purposes.
92
Mobilising the land, the hypertrophic state set about controlling all labour.
This began with St George’s Day limitations for monastery debtors in the
1450s. That demonstrated what could be done, and in the 1497 Sudebnik it
was applied to all peasants.
93
As discussed in considerably greater detail in
Chapter 12,in1592 all peasants were forbidden to move at all. As also discussed
in Chapter 12, having decided that it had the power to control the legal status
of the peasantry, the state decided that it could alter the status of the slaves.
Slaves were the subject of a remarkable number of articles in 1497, far more
than any other sector of society.
94
Except for emancipations, such dramatic
state interventions in the institution of slavery are rare in human history. Full
slavery was melded into limited service contract slavery, and then in the 1590s
thenatureof the ‘limitation’ changed from an antichresis (see Chapter12) of one
91 RichardHellie,Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1971), pp. 37–8.
92 Even today, fences are not as common in Eastern Europe as they are in America. One
may assume that the appearance of fences reflects a desire to save labour on herding
livestock and to protect crops from grazing livestock, as well as an increasing value of
land. See 1497 Sudebnik,art.61; 1550Sudebnik,arts.86, 87; 1589 Sudebnik,arts.168, 171.
93 1497 Sudebnik,art.55. This was elaborated on in 1550 Sudebnik,art.88, which reflected
the introduction of the three-field system of agriculture.
94 1497 Sudebnik,arts.17, 18, 23, 40–3, 55, 56, 66. The centrality of slavery in Muscovy is
further reflected in 1550 Sudebnik,arts.26, 35, 40, 54, 59–63, 65–7, 71, 77–81. Article 76 is a
miniature slavery statute, and article 90 reflects the increasing use of slaves in military
operations; a slave who was captured by enemy forces was freed if he returned to
Muscovy. The fact that there were so many articles on slavery in 1589 Sudebnik (arts. 88,
113, 115, 117, 119–21, 136–46, 182) is a manifestation of how omni-present the institution
wasinMuscovy.
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year that defaulted to hereditary full slavery upon inability after a year to repay
aloan to slaveryforthelifeof the owner,followedbycompulsoryemancipation
upon his death. In 1550 the government decreed that able-bodied townsmen
had to live in the juridical towns, not on monastery urban property.
95
In the
1590s the government decided that it had the right to control the mobility of
townsmen (paralleling the control over peasant mobility),
96
which culminated
in the 1649 Ulozhenie’s prohibition against townsmen’s leaving their place of
urban residence. This is a perfect example of how the ‘Agapetus monarchy’
developed the maximalist state which found few areas of Russian life where it
could not intervene.
97
Comparatively, what is interesting is the use of law in
this evolution. In America, forexample, law is often seen as a very conservative
institutionthat is the codification of a realitythatsometimeshasalreadypassed.
In early modern Russia, on the other hand, law became the statement of social
programmes that the state was hoping to enact; and it usually could enforce
most of what it had enacted. In this respect Muscovy was the perfect ancestor
of the Soviet Union, a radical political organisation with a programme of
social change it was constantly attempting to enact. The result was the first
service-class revolution.
A few more words need to be said about landed property. The con-
ditional service landholdings (pomest’ia) have been mentioned. Hereditary
estates (votchiny) were of various kinds: princely, boyaral, monastery, clan,
granted and purchased. Each had its own rules for sale and the possibility of
redemption. Monastery estates in practice were inalienable, but most votchiny
could be given away, willed by testament, sold, exchanged and mortgaged.
In reality, landed property was rarely mobilised in the economy because ser-
vice landholdings were state property reserved for military service and pri-
vate hereditary estates could be redeemed for up to forty years after sale at
the price the seller had received for it.
98
Thus it made no sense for any private
person to buy land, and as a result it is impossible to find agricultural land
prices in Muscovy.
99
By the end of the fifteenth century the land in Muscovy was beginning to fill
up, and contests over landownership became more frequent. In the interests
95 1550Sudebnik,art.91; 1589 Sudebnik,arts.184, 188, 189. This had no 1497 precedent.
96 Richard Hellie (ed. and trans.),Muscovite Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Syllabus
Division, 1967 and 1970), pp. 33–47.
97 Richard Hellie, ‘The Expanding Role of the State in Russia’, in Jarmo T. Kotilaine and
Marshall T. Poe (eds.), Modernizing Muscovy: Reform and Social Change in Seventeenth-
Century Russia (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 29–56.
98 1550Sudebnik,art.85. This had no 1497 antecedent. See also 1589 Sudebnik,arts.164, 165.
99 Richard Hellie, The Economy and Material Culture of Russia 1600–1725 (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 391–3, 411.
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of efficiency seen throughout this chapter, the 1497 Sudebnik imposed statutes
of limitations on the filing of suits over landownership between monaster-
ies, members of the service class, and peasants (three years) and between the
sovereign, monasteries and servicemen (six years).
100
Here one can see the
ancestor of the five-year statute of limitations on the filing of suits for
the recovery of fugitive serfs of 1592. There were no statutes of limitations
on the filing of suits for moveable property, including slaves.
The rules of inheritance were spelled out in the Sudebniki. An oral or written
will had precedence. In its absence, a son inherited. Next was a daughter, then
other members of the clan. Failing that, property escheated to the prince.
101
As observed by D. P. Makovskii some decades ago, prior to Ivan’s oprich-
nina (1565–72) Muscovy was developing into a commercial society.
102
This is
evident in the law, where numerous articles deal with loans.
103
Of particular
interest is the provision permitting borrowing with the payment of interest.
104
New legislation on branding horses may or may not reflect an increasing
commoditisation of horses.
105
By 1613 Russian law had changed considerably from the law of the late Mid-
dle Ages, but elements of continuity must also be stressed. First and foremost
was the fact that law remained a major revenue-raising device for officialdom.
Law remained a device for cleaning up social messes, be they felonies or civil
disputes. The major distinction between the earlier era and the pre-Romanov
decades was that the distinction between felonies – in which the state took
an increasing interest – and civil disputes, about which the state ordinarily
could not care less, was heightened by changes in the essence of society that
required a change in the legal process from a dyadic one to a triadic one as well
as changes in the nature of the state power, from a relatively benign and weak
organism with few pretensions, to an increasingly assertive autocracy that
recognised few limitations on its authority. This was facilitated by increasing
literacy both in the capital and in the provinces among the handfuls of people
who mattered and who were essential for keeping the records required for
keeping track of slave ownership, land allocation and possession, military ser-
vice and compensation, foreign relations and accusations of domestic treason,
100 1497 Sudebnik,art.63; 1550Sudebnik,arts.24, 84; 1589 Sudebnik,arts.37, 149, 150, 156.
101 1497 Sudebnik,art.60; 1550Sudebnik,art.92; 1589 Sudebnik,art.190.
102 D. P. Makovskii, Razvitie tovarno-denezhnykh otnoshenii v sel’skom khoziaistve Russkogo
gosudarstva v XVI veka (Smolensk: Smolenskii pedagogicheskii institut, 1963).
103 1497 Sudebnik,arts.53, 55. Note the 1550Sudebnik expansion: arts. 11, 15, 16, 31, 36, 82, 90.
See also 1589 Sudebnik,arts.15, 84, 146, 147, 181, 182.
104 1550Sudebnik,art.36; 1589 Sudebnik,art.84. This had no precedent.
105 1550Sudebnik,arts.94–6; 1589 Sudebnik,arts.195–8.
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post roads, and what happened at trial. Law still had the function of determin-
ing inheritance and preserving male superiority and regime dominance, but
almost to an astonishing extent it became the government’s mouthpiece for
directing social change towards a rigidly stratified, almost-caste society. Law
became a major instrument in preserving what the legislators wanted to keep
from the past while simultaneously serving as a major instrument in assisting
change in desired directions.
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17
Political ideas and rituals
michael s. flier
Shortlyafterthededication ofMoscow’scathedralchurchin1479, GrandPrince
Ivan III accused Metropolitan Gerontii of contravening ritual tradition by lead-
ing the cross procession around the church counterclockwise (protiv solntsa)
instead of clockwise (po solon’) during the dedication service. Perhaps Ivan was
motivated by superstition, given the collapse of the previous reconstruction.
Or perhaps he was influenced by the Catholic-orientated entourage around
his second wife, Sophia Palaeologa, a former ward of the Pope. Whatever the
cause, he forbade the consecration of any church in Moscow for three years
while he investigated previous practice. Finding no conclusive protocols, he
was obliged to recant in 1482 to prevent the metropolitan’s resignation.
1
This
rare personal episode involving ritual and political control reveals a connection
that merits further enquiry.
Ritual, with its attendant symbols and actions, powerfully expresses the
ways in which members of a society, especially its elites, see themselves and
wish themselves to be seen. The present chapter seeks to describe and analyse
the function of ritual in representing political ideas in Muscovy before the
seventeenth century. Politicalritual refers to that set of conventionalised events
ruled by protocol and consisting of separate acts performed in public whose
purpose is to confirm or restore links to a commonly held political concept or
belief for the ritual’s participants and observers. The interlocking spheres of
politicsandreligioninmedieval societypresupposethepresentationofpolitical
ideology within a spiritual framework. Religious symbolism approximates the
harmony of political structure with the providence of God.
As with any rite, the successful performance of a ritual is understood to
be transformative. A grand prince is made tsar; water is made holy to benefit
those in need of grace; a subject is confirmed in his loyalty and politically
1 PSRL, vol. vi, pt. 2 (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury, 2001), pp. 286–7, 313–14; PSRL,
vol. xx, pt. 1 (St Petersburg: Tipografiia M. A. Aleksandrova, 1910), pp. 335, 348.
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